Religious donors don't figure to cut back

Despite the economic downturn, more than half of actively religious donors plan to give the same or more to charitable causes in 2009 as they did last year, a new survey shows.

Cygnus Applied Research, a Chicago-based international research firm, completed a survey of more than 17,000 U.S. donors to charitable causes in February. It found that 57 percent of actively religious donors said they expected to give more or the same amount to charitable causes as they did in 2008.

Researchers found that more than a third (37 percent) of donors described themselves as “actively religious.” About a quarter (24 percent) said they were “not at all religious,” and 38 percent said they were “somewhere in between.”